from the wow dept

This is definitely a surprise, but it looks like AT&T finally read all the writing on the wall, and realized it was unlikely to win its fight with the DOJ and FCC and has officially killed its plan to try to purchase T-Mobile... meaning that it now has to pay the $4 billion breakup fee. While the trend of where this was heading was becoming increasingly obvious over the past few months, it's still pretty shocking on the whole. Getting big mergers like this through had become pretty standard, and AT&T (especially) excelled at the political dealing to make such things work. However, the growing public outcry and concerns over the lack of competition that would result seemed to finally have had a real impact.